Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2
Page 36
It was on that same trip—in fact, just minutes later—that they found themselves plunged into a social change even more startling than the radar range.
… we were walking to our hotel, reached a cocktail parlor on Market Street and Ginny decided that we were footsore and weary (we were) and needed a drink. So we stopped in. And I encountered for the first time the San Francisco “topless.” It was a perfectly quiet, ordinary Madison-Avenue-type bar—but all of the waitresses (6 or 7) and the bartenders (2, female) were “topless”—i.e., they decidedly were not “topless”—their tops were on display from the waist up and most of them were unusually well endowed in the milk-gland department.15
Carol Doda, who had started the topless craze by climbing up on a white baby grand piano dressed only in a bikini bottom on June 16, 1964, set a high standard in that area: Her original 34” bust was about to be surgically enhanced to 44” (and that kind of surgical enhancement was relatively new, too).
Their costumes varied from “Cretan Empire” dresses down to one little blonde who seemed to feel that the lower half of a bikini ultra-minimum was enough—and every variation in between. Their uniforms were “uniform” only in that each one displayed these twin full moons. I found it all rather startling at first (there had been no warning outside) but in about five minutes it becomes commonplace (while remaining, in my opinion, pleasant).
That evening we had dinner at the Playboy Club—the beautiful Bunnies’ beautiful costumes looked downright puritanical. Afterwards we went to one of the North Beach night clubs which features a “topless amateur night” (No, Ginny did not volunteer!)—and stayed only one drink as the “music” was the loudest I have ever heard.…
San Francisco is a unique city, probably the most cosmopolitan city in the world—and I include New York and Hong Kong in saying that—and has far more art, music, ballet, and theater than anyone can possibly use … [sic] plus the wildest Honkytonk outside of Tokyo.16
Robert had been poking at individual minds on a retail basis for decades, saying “wake up!” and think more, reader by individual reader. His timing had been just right. The boys—and girls—he had been Horatio-Algering in the 1940s and 1950s were now in their twenties and thirties—and in control of their own pursestrings—and the generation coming up behind the crest of the wave were impatient with their buttoned-down, repressed elders, whose attitudes were a legacy of the Eisenhower era.
Heinlein had gotten out of children’s lit just in time.
His big book on hypocrisy—Stranger in a Strange Land—was just coming into its own. He was starting to get all kinds of strange mail on that book: A magazine of literary criticism wanted to use Grok for their title; Kerry Thornley, the founder of a group called “Kerista,” wrote saying that Stranger was virtually the group’s “Bible.” Several people had already mentioned not being able to find a copy anywhere. The royalty report in April 1966 showed a startling $968.89 for Stranger—probably almost ten thousand copies sold in the last six months, five years after the book was published—and Avon had just issued a reprint of 150,000 in January 1966. Walter Minton, owner and CEO of Putnam’s, was bringing up the Future History omnibus again, since the rights to Methuselah’s Children had finally cleared from Gnome, so Heinlein braced them for a hardcover reissue of Stranger—or, failing that, a new paperback edition.
In mid-April, they found an AIA architect locally, Kermit Darrow, and he recommended a solution to their Echo Street problems: The former owner of the Bonny Doon property also owned a summer cabin nearby and consented to rent it to them. Once they were settled into this temporary accommodation, Heinlein was finally able to set up his typewriter and clear off some of the accumulations of minor work. He had received an inquiry through Blassingame for film rights for The Puppet Masters from an English producer (Orson Welles, they later discovered), but the option Robert had given to American International as part of the settlement of the lawsuit was still running, and Welles never followed up after Corman let it lapse.
Harlan Ellison prompted him again in May: It was “utterly necessary,” he assured Heinlein, that the Dangerous Visions anthology have a Heinlein story—but his end-of-May deadline was approaching.
Heinlein had really not had time to think about writing at all in the last eight months. But he did have one story in his files that might fit Ellison’s criteria of “rejected-for-being-too-unconventional,” and he had pulled the file copy of “Three Brave Men” to bring along on the trip. This was a story he had written in 1946, from the anecdote his brother had told him when he came to Fitzsimmons Army and Navy hospital in 1933, about TB patients dying on the table of artificial pneumothorax. He revised and retitled it “No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying” and got it off to Ellison before the submission deadline.
But that story found another stool to fall between: Ellison had been looking for a “shocker.” This story could be considered science fiction only by the most liberal possible interpretation of genre boundaries—but it just didn’t fit in at all with the confrontational stories Ellison had been assembling, stories rejected by conventional markets precisely because they were too much in tune with the new style of political and cultural discourse that was just coming into being. Rejecting a Heinlein story, Ellison told Heinlein, made him a certifiable lunatic17—but it just wasn’t right for this project. He returned it.
The architect was being difficult. The house was just too different. He wanted to scrap their eccentric designs and start over fresh. It was a frustratingly long process to convince him that they actually did want all the peculiar features they had specified. Ginny developed a sore shoulder from all the driving and carrying and wound up going to a local doctor. The same day, Robert collapsed in agony with a hernia, brought about by his own efforts. He was rushed to the hospital on June 1 and operated on the next day, the first of three hernia surgeries.
He was out in a few days (discharged on June 6), but did not bounce back: He was sleepy all the time, and it was a struggle to get even minimal paperwork done. “It is not unpleasant save that I am totally useless and the work piles up.”18
With construction actually getting under way, the one thing they absolutely had to get done was to pump some action into their Colorado real estate agent. He seemed to have gone dead on them. Ginny located another agent and took the listing out of his hands. June Compagnon was more energetic.
One morning there was a wolf in the driveway, and that brought home to them that the local wildlife really was wild. Ginny had delighted in spotting wild deer on the property, usually in the early morning, before the banging and sawing started up. “She counts any day lost in which she does not see at least one deer—so far not more than two or three days of the last two months have been ‘lost.’”19 But they had to have a fence, for many reasons (the local deer thought Ginny’s rows of miniature roses were a salad bar).
They must have been doing something Jungian and archetypal: A visitation by a wolf would have been a major omen in ancient Rome. But that was just the start of it: One morning, not too long thereafter, Ginny went to the cabin to make coffee for their construction crew. In the driveway, coming back to the construction site with a lunch pail, she was set upon by eagles—seven of them—stooping on her out of the sky! She skidded under some brush but was otherwise unhurt. Robert simply refused to believe it—until it happened to him, too.20
The plans Darrow, the architect, delivered were full of glaring errors, page after page of them. Robert gritted his teeth and corrected the mistakes. Darrow could sign off on them. Having to redo the floor plans was holding up the specifications—which were what Robert really needed.
While Darrow corrected the most serious mistakes, Robert discussed the Future History omnibus that was back on the table at Putnam’s—this time, apparently, for good, as Walter Minton had worked out a tricky copublication deal with the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club that would allow them to keep the price at $7.00—still high, but not absolutely impossible. Rob
ert could take the opportunity to include “Searchlight” and “The Menace from Earth,” the two Future History stories written since the last of the Shasta collections in 1953—and he might write some of the “unwritten stories” to fill out the concept—“Fire Down Below” if he could manage a research trip to Antarctica; “Da Capo” definitely—the “final novel of the series” he had planned to write in the fall had been derailed by the move from Colorado.
For the introduction, Robert suggested A. P. White or Willy Ley. Minton counter-suggested Damon Knight, whom Minton had hired as a consulting editor for his newly acquired paperback line, Berkley Books. Knight’s 1956 book of critical essays, In Search of Wonder, Heinlein had found very impressive:
It is a job that both publisher and author should be proud of … You can imagine how delighted I was with his essays. I do not mean what he said about me; while it was pleasing I cannot pretend to be objective about anything so personal. I refer to what he said about others and about this field of writing in general. Either he is a great critic or it happens that his tastes and mine coincide.21
Minton also wanted some kind of “poetic” title, and Robert was fresh out of poetry at the moment. Targ apparently suggested The Past to Tomorrow, but Robert counter-suggested a tweak: The Past Through Tomorrow. That made the title something he could live with.22 They sent the tearsheets for the stories to Damon Knight to read for his introduction.
One early story, “‘Let There Be Light,’” Knight suggested, was too different in tone and key from the others, clearly an inferior story even though it belonged in the canon, “&, if this is not an impertinence, I wish you would leave it out.”23 Targ and Marcia Magill, his sub-editor who was doing much of the legwork on this project, concurred, and Heinlein himself told Willy Ley that he felt the story was too weak.24 The galleys were printed without “‘Let There Be Light’”—though “‘We Also Walk Dogs,’” a story that is completely inconsistent with the Future History, was left in. Robert did not have time to write “Fire Down Below” or “Da Capo.” He had to turn over the galleys to Ginny to proofread by herself, while he dealt with an architect crisis.
The architect wanted to go on vacation in the middle of their construction—which is just not professional for a builder. Heinlein fired him and took over the job himself, holding up the last $1,000 payment for two very tense weeks until the worst of his errors was corrected so they could get the permit process under way. That same day, their water-system subcontractor came out and gave them a temporary tank and hook-up. Five days later, on the last day of August, Heinlein squared the cornerstone of the masonry, working together with his bricklayers, who had been hanging fire since February. The architect had cost them $4,000 in fees and four months of summer construction weather. They would have to hurry to get the bricks laid before the rains started in late October or early November. Heinlein also had to finish the floorplans Darrow had left undone, and create all the hundreds of specifications by himself. He worked on the plans at night, handling such writing business matters as came up in whatever time he could get away from the drawing board.
As rest from what was, after all, a tedious form of mechanical engineering, he helped his contractors with the cabinetry work and bricklaying.25
In the winter, when the building eased off, Heinlein read Jerry Pournelle’s first novel and helped out with writerly advice (swearing him to secrecy, as he did not want to be deluged with requests for such critiques). Poul Anderson wanted him to run for the top office in SFWA when Damon Knight’s term ran out, later that year.26 Robert was very dubious about that: Not only could he not make time for the duties required of the presidency of a brand-new union, but,
I think it would be unwise of me ever to stand for president. At some later time, if asked, I would seriously consider serving as secretary or as vice president—but I do not think it would be good either for me or for the organization for me to occupy the top spot.27
Several universities had written him recently, asking for his working papers (university libraries had recently begun to open archival collections of working writers and academics, to supplement the special collections they had for a very long time kept of classic figures)—flattering, but he couldn’t imagine what a university librarian would want with several tons of junk papers. And, besides, he said, he kept this stuff because he was using it. His writing career wasn’t over yet.28
As 1967 came on, he got three such requests. One was from Donald T. Clark, the university librarian at the nearby, newly founded (1965), University of California, Santa Cruz. Heinlein had met Clark in April and May 1966 while he was using the library there for some research. This request to establish the Robert A. Heinlein Archive at UC Santa Cruz was flattering in a more pragmatically practical way. He received Clark, along with Rita Berner, the young woman who had recently been named Head of Special Collections, a few days later in their summer cabin.29
The university was only ten to fifteen miles away from their new house site—and Clark assured him they could photocopy any document he needed to reference, usually on twenty-four hours’ notice or less. That made it very practical. Even better, Heinlein could take a tax deduction on the gift in the year it occurred—which would help since the Stranger royalties were throwing his budget out of whack.
Early in 1967, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress went out of print, and Putnam’s ordered a second impression. The fan mail on Stranger continued to increase—and invitations to speak. Michael Murphy, at a place called Esalen, wanted him to colead a seminar on “Religion in the Space Age” with Alan Watts, America’s Zen teacher,30 and an Episcopalian priest, David Baar.31 When interest plateaued in 1967, he was receiving speaking invitations on average twice a week. By the end of 1966, the complaints from readers about not being able to find copies of Stranger were becoming a chorus. Putnam’s unwillingness to consider a reissue was becoming very odd, and Robert was getting fed up. Also, Ginny noticed a consistent pattern of small accounting errors in the royalty statements—always in Putnam’s favor. By the end of the year, the errors totaled nearly fifteen hundred dollars—a very substantial amount in 1966 dollars.
This was becoming intolerable. They were reporting tens of thousands of sales for Stranger (Avon had only 15,000 left of its January 1966 issue of 150,00032) but simultaneously saying sales were too low to justify a reissue. After five years, most hardcover sales of most books were made to libraries—and libraries weren’t buying Stranger; Minton thought it was because of two negative reviews in library journals early on. But this made no sense in terms of Stranger’s actual pattern of sales: “A California writer, who is dramatizing Stranger for the stage, recently drove across the country and tried in every city through which he passed to buy the book but was unable to find it anywhere.”33 But Putnam’s was not willing to take the (nonexistent) risk of ordering a hardcover reprint. Avon could make a reissue when their stocks ran out.
At Avon they considered the resurgence of interest in the book a fad in the science-fiction community and planned a full reissue in July 1967. The demand would probably last only three or four months … 34
21
STALLED
They had had Barry-the-cat shipped out from Colorado—heavily sedated—in October, when they thought they would have a home to offer him imminently. And they had just acquired a companion for him, a girl cat named Smoky that Ginny had adopted rather than see her sent on a one-way trip to the pound.
The rains came on in November, with the foundation in and the masonry walls only partly finished. They finished the walls and got the roof on in the middle of the rainy season and began using the Bonny Doon address on correspondence before the end of November.
Now that they had actual covered storage, it was time to pack up the contents of the old house in Colorado and ship everything to California. They had been making do with house-sitters—a pleasant young woman who had to leave for the World Figure Skating competition. It was time to push on the sale of the house.
What would probably work best, Compagnon told them, was a half-year lease (to keep the house occupied and to prevent deterioration over the winter—and to help defray expenses) while they looked into the possibility of mortgaging the property. A point or two under the going rate of 7 percent would be ideal. That would allow a buyer to assume a mortgage on attractive terms.
By January 2, 1967, June Compagnon had found a renter for them, one Marshal Herro—a skating mom. The Heinleins flew to Colorado Springs on January 4 for an anticipated four days of packing and were surprised and very pleased to be met at the airport by Pete and Jane Sencenbaugh—along with a new Chevrolet sedan with snow tires, for their use while there. Even better, they found a hot dinner—service complet—vodka, whiskey, and mixers on hand, and breakfast makings in the refrigerator. They were very touched: Warm and thoughtful friendships like that are an irreplaceable asset, and a life spent making that sort of relationship is well spent, no matter what else you do in the meantime.
All Ginny’s medical symptoms came back, but she worked through the pain, sorting and packing. They wound up with eleven thousand pounds of books and possessions—seventy packing cases just of books—and gave away or junked as much more. Robert also thinned out his working files: About a quarter of the working papers altogether went up in smoke.
On Sunday, January 8, their new renter showed up unexpectedly—before they had even signed the lease—and demanded without preliminaries that they clear themselves and their possessions out right now as she intended to sleep there that night. The woman actually began threatening, and it took over an hour to get her out of the house. Robert and Ginny were speechless: Apparently, civility—even basic sanity—is not universal even among ice skaters.